The Trend Is Toast

Rare is the food trend that doesn’t garner backlash and the designation “overrated”; cf. cupcakes, cronuts, and kale, all mentioned in Sophie Brickman’s Talk of the Town story last week about the food-trend chronicler David Sax. Rarer still is the food trend that garners such immediate and absolute derision as “artisanal toast,” a category that seems to apply to any stand-alone restaurant or café menu item consisting of high-quality, crisped-up bread topped with something simple (like “small-batch” almond butter) and not called crostini or bruschetta.

Back in January, John Gravois, a writer for the California magazine Pacific Standard, set out to investigate the source of the craze in San Francisco, where he’d been watching it gather steam. What he discovered was an origin story that was fascinating and heartwarming enough to become a segment on This American Life; I won’t spoil it for you. But Gravois’s skepticism of the trend itself went beyond finding it overrated—he was practically appalled by it. The first line of his article describes the toast-making process with scorn: “All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them.” Later, he writes, “I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly San Francisco, this toast,” and quotes the manager of the café where he first noticed it: “Tip of the hipster spear.”

NPR’s food and drink blog, the Salt, published two recent posts about the trend, the first an April Fool’s gag, promoting a toast-cooking class (“From demystifying the ‘Wonder’ of sliced bread to exploring a variety of techniques ranging from light to dark to extra dark, you’ll learn how to transform your favorite loaf to a crispy golden state”), the second an Onion-style parody of the different methods one might use to “TIY,” or toast it yourself (fireplace, blowtorch, coffeemaker, clothes dryer).

In the Seattle newspaper the Stranger, a writer named Bethany Jean Clement expounded at length upon the reasons to disdain toast as a craft item. Noting that the cost of a slice or two of artisanal toast could buy a whole loaf of bread, she explained, “Part of the moral outrage here is economic: Toast is meant to be a thrifty food, meant to make homespun, happy use of otherwise less-than-optimally-fresh bread,” and she points out that French toast in French is pain perdu, meaning, literally, “lost bread” that would otherwise be fed to the birds. (In a recent Critic’s Notebook, Pete Wells lamented the growing tendency of restaurants to charge for a bread “course”; the only thing worse, it might follow, is being charged for a stale-bread course.) And “the sense of perversity” goes even deeper, Clement argues: “Toast is home, toast is hearth.… Toast is…the first thing you learn to make.… Even a completely incompetent cook can make this one perfect thing.”

According to David Sax, the most successful food trends reflect what’s going on in society at a given time. Americans wanted cupcakes ten years ago, he told Brickman, because they sought childhood comforts after the trauma of 9/11; Americans wanted fondue in the sixties because they aspired to cosmopolitanism. Artisanal toast, one might posit, represents our intensifying obsession with and fetishization of food. Every meal is special and important, every dish should be elevated, revered, and broadcast—even something as pedestrian as toast.

We’re willing to spend more energy and money on food than ever before, and we are what we eat—not only literally, but in terms of identity, too. “Avocado toast”—which might be described as a sub- or tangent-trend—has grown particular legs because it overlaps with another potent trend: “clean living.” Popularized by the Nolita restaurant Café Gitane and by the life-style guru Gwyneth Paltrow, who included a recipe for it in her cookbook “It’s All Good” (in which she compares it to “a favorite pair of jeans”), it’s healthy yet indulgent: “good fat,” on the one hand, carbs on the other. It’s incredibly easy to make. Most important, it looks great on Instagram, thereby making whoever posts photos of it look great.

In the case of most food trends, the backlash begins when a food is deemed overhyped (cronuts), or when it simply overstays its welcome (cupcakes, kale). In the case of artisanal toast, the backlash seems directed more at the societal phenomenon it evinces than at the food itself. Who doesn’t like toast? The economic and moral objections to it could be used against many of the things we consume in restaurants—coffee, for instance—and Clement admits that the toast she sampled at Tallulah’s, a café in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, was excellent. Artisanal toast is hardly the first harbinger of our food obsession, or even necessarily the most egregious, but it’s become a scapegoat for a growing, broader cultural backlash; the toast that broke the camel's back. The issue is not the toast so much as a rapidly changing San Francisco and a world in which food matters, maybe more than it should.